Frosty the snowman
by idioticonion
Summary: After a zombie apocalypse, we discover what happened to our gang. Alt-universe set after Season 5  no Season 6 spoilers . Lots of violence, death and angst. A two-part story.
1. Chapter 1

I have no idea who I am.

I hang out in a bar a lot. It's one of those basement bars that were fashionable in a city that used to be so teaming with life. Somehow, hiding out in a basement in an empty building amongst so many other empty buildings seems as sane an answer to what's happening in the world as any other. And there are a few of us here. A few, lonely souls gathered together because it seems right to reside in a place that used to be so full of conviviality and warmth. We are drawn from all walks of life it seems. From what the others are wearing, I sometimes make up stories about them in my head. Who was _he_, in the football sweater and jeans? Who was _she_, wearing an apron and one high-heeled stiletto? Who am I, dressed to impress in a suit and tie? There's not a lot else to do in these dark days. Mostly we just stand around and stare at each other, at the walls, the empty and broken bottles, and occasionally, we groan.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I'm dead, dude.

And not in the classical non-corporeal, wafting ghost-ily around the place way. This is no awesome haunting, with lights and flashes and some medium trying cast out my evil spirit. No, those of us that are left are way, way too fleshy for that. I have no memory of what happened to me, to us. Compared to the others, I think I look relatively whole. Sometimes I wander into the restroom and gaze reflectively into the moulded mirror for hours, maybe even days. Aside from the grey pallor and steel-shine eyes, I am more or less human-looking; more or less intact.

The others – not so much. They have missing piece of flesh, missing limbs, exposed, desiccated abdominal cavities. A couple have missing faces. We're like a ghoulish, Christmas tableau.

Did I mention that it's Christmas? It's always Christmas. You can tell because there's a tree, and tattered decorations across and around the bar. Sometimes the electrics flicker to life (possibly as the result of a generator sputtering awake on some long forgotten cycle) and the tree lights up, the jukebox clicks on and the bar is filled with music – Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and some choir of too-enthusiastic women singing _Frosty the Snowman_.

There should be ooes and ahhs from the clientele. The lights and the music should move us but it doesn't. I have no memory of anything before this. I have no idea why I cling to this place, this bar, this subterranean holiday hell. Am I waiting? We, the Dead, have the patience of eternity here. Patience, that is, until the hunger overtakes us. When that happens, a few of us go foraging. We drag our heavy feet up the steps to street level, push our way through the overturned cars and the detritus of living and we _hunt_.

Seriously, what happened here? A war? A plague? What descended upon humanity that wiped us clean from this great city, aside from the last few Living that have banded together at the Yankee Stadium? What happened to leave me here, existing, an affront against nature? What possibly could have led to this? My brain is a blank, just as my blood is sluggish black ooze now in my veins. Something keeps me together, keeps us together, but we're like the bar - we're running on stuttering backup power. We don't walk, we shamble and limp. When we catch the scent of the Living, we are relentless. A group of them are holed up a couple of blocks down Amsterdam and we can smell them from here.

We hunt them. We consume the living in order to stretch out our meagre existence. I feel no fear, no guilt, no regret. Even though anyone still alive is bound to be armed, bound to take a few of us Dead with them, still I stand outside their apartment and gaze up at the flickering light from the window and I crave the taste of sweet blood on my lips, the magical firework sensation of brains on my tongue.

It begins to snow.

I'm never that quick to begin with. Although I can think, can construct intelligent prose in the confines of my own skull, it never seems to translate very easily into externals. Oh, I can talk – monosyllabic and grunting, a form of communication that's atrophied because the other Dead can't converse at all. I understand language but I can't read it. Words and letters are just unknowable glyphs to me. I don't even remember my own name, let along that of my companions. I wonder how much goes on inside their heads, my fellow bar-carrion. I wonder for whom and for what they are waiting.

Are we waiting?

Standing outside the apartment that contains a few living souls, I know it must be cold but I don't feel a thing. My suit is quickly speckled in tiny white specs of snow, covering the dark material and the spatters of dried gore; covering the obscene evidence of my crimes and making me clean and new and sparkling. How many people have I killed and eaten? How long have I been here? I have no idea, but somehow I appreciate this brief benediction from heaven.

Suddenly we surge forward and I get jostled to the rear as our scavenging party races up the stairwell, pushing through the reinforced doors like they are paper. I'm aware of my strength – the power of my fists, hardened like petrified-wood. I can rip apart a living, breathing human like tissue if I don't get a bullet in the brain first.

It's carnage from the first moment. The pop-crash of gunfire should hurt my ears, but even the concept of pain seems alien to me now, either for me or for my victims. I can't empathise. In fact, I could almost hate the people I eat, if I was capable of feeling any emotion at all. I guess it's hypocritical for me, a guy who could almost pass for human, to distain human life so. But when their life-force is all around me, like the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree, it wakes something in my gut, some need, some desire, and I roar. I grab the first guy I see – there's terror in his eyes, I'm close enough to the life force to recognise that emotion – and something else. Recognition? Horror? I sink my teeth into his throat and his death is quick, clean and efficient. An orgiastic torrent of blood gushes across my face and I'm practically bathed in it, which makes it tricky for me to get a good grip on him, smash his skull back against the hard, concrete floor and feast on the treasure within.

I'm so caught up in my prize that everything shrinks down to a point, this moment which seems bright and red and alive, so different to the hours, days and years spent locked in the colourless limbo of my Death. I don't know how long I spend eating him, this man who was somebody's friend, somebody's husband, somebody's father, but finally I finish and look up. It's then that I see her, a Living woman, not huddling on the floor or firing wildly like the others, but standing stock-still, handgun raised, choosing her targets carefully and deliberately, not wasting a single shot.

I see her, and it could be the taste of cerebellum still on my tongue, or some long-dormant holiday spirit, but something stirs in my gut. I hiss, a string of syllables that stream from my lips like somebody's twisted the cap from a beer bottle. "Schhhhhh."

She turns, her dark hair framing her face, her blue eyes burning, and she points the barrel of her gun right at me, without flinching, without hesitation. What must I look like to her? A frozen, frightening apparition, all white and red, covered in snow and gore. And maybe this is what I've been waiting for. Maybe this is finally the end?

I close my eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

I close my eyes and there is silence - no ending, no crack of her weapon discharging. Her gun has jammed it seems. I stand there, face smeared with the blood and the grey matter of her companion, and she screams at me. Not a frightened, girl-scream, but a yell of horror and disgust and white-hot fury.

And still I stand there while another of my companions swipes her feet out from under her and her temple thuds against a table as she goes down. She doesn't move, and because it's dark and chaotic, the other Dead lose interest in her. They've really got no imaginations. It's embarrassing.

But their inattention gives me time to shuffle forward and scoop her up in my arms. I crash through the room, carrying her weight easily, and smash my way out of the apartment and back down the old stairwell. I have no idea where I'm taking her. Some instinct tells me that the bar is a bad idea. After all, I'm carrying take-out and I don't want to share.

But I head back towards the bar anyway, travelling the familiar streets like a box car on rails. I can't deviate from my path. I don't even know how anymore.

Strange feelings cloud over me. I look down at the woman in my arms and I know that she is very brave and very beautiful. I know this more from somewhere inside me than from any evidence back up in that apartment. I know it like it's… a memory.

Somehow, I come to a stop. My bar is just at the end of the block but it's like I've run out of energy. Strange sensations continue to assault me - Strange images, tastes and sounds.

I remember this street and this girl in my arms. I even remember my bar, but in a way that's barely recognisable from the wreck that it's become. Somehow I remember when my bar was anything but dead. Back then, it was bustling with young people and their laughter and the overwhelming stink of beer and perfume and life. My friends and I, we were the loudest. We were the kings and queens of this tiny corner of Manhattan. The girl in my arms, I know her name now. Her name is Robin.

And I know exactly where to take her. I take her home.

#~-

The brownstone above my bar is surprisingly intact and the apartment I enter isn't badly wrecked. There's still a couch in the middle of the living room and it's there I deposit the unconscious girl.

The memories flood in on me, confusing and disorienting me. I pace slowly around the apartment, associating the various bric-a-brac of life with different events. There's a miniature telephone box that I remember most strongly, and a poster on the wall. When I see the photographs I freeze and stand there, immobile, for some time.

I have no idea how long Robin remains unconscious, but when she wakes I'm still staring at the photographs. I remember them - the people in them, and me. These memories of me.

But... but... I know what I look like. I've spent whole days just looking into the mirror. The face in these photographs looks nothing like that face. The guy in the photos is…

Oh god, the guy in the photos is the guy I _killed_ in the apartment. It's the guy whose brains I ate. This isn't _me_, I realize. These memories are not _my_ memories.

Suddenly there's a roar from behind me and I turn, too slowly, and a hunk of glass embeds itself into my chest. I look up, dumbly. "Doesn't… work." I say, struggling with each word. I want to explain that she can cut up my body as much as she likes but unless she destroys my brain, I'll keep coming after her like the freakin' Terminator.

"You can talk?" She blurts, clearly surprised. I can see that she's looking frantically around for some kind of weapon, her face flushed with anger. She's swaying though. She's weak and she's hurt and she's probably starving. At least I can empathise with that last emotion.

"Won't… hurt… you…" I groan. I don't know what I'm trying to say. Of course I _want_ to hurt her. I want to grab her by the hair and smash in her pretty head and scoop out her tasty cerebellum. But I killed her friend and for some reason I'm now afflicted with his pesky emotions. Did she know her friend was in love with her, I wonder? My body is pulsing and my chest feels tight, like my lungs are bursting, and it's all a little too much for a zombie-about-town to deal with.

Plus, she's really ruined my suit. I like this suit! In this suit I could almost pass for human. I never realized how much that matters until it was ruined.

"Sit… down…" I say, and it comes out slurred and irritable. She glares at me but it's not my fault I'm slow. Making words is _hard_. I can see why most of the Dead don't bother. "Before… you… fall-"

"Down?" She interrupts me. "Just know this. I'm going to kill you before you kill me. That is literally all your kind do, isn't it? Jesus, I can't believe I'm trying to have an existential conversation with a zombie!" She laughs, but it's strained. For a moment, I think she's actually going to comply.

Then she lunges across the couch and makes a break for one of the bedrooms. I, like the idiot-savant than I am, just stand there. I try to look like I'm weighing my options, but the only time I move fast is to catch my food and for some reason I can't bring myself to eat her right now.

There's just so many stolen memories packed inside my head, like flowers blooming haphazardly in a field. I worry that if I don't take the time to look at each one, they'll wither and die, leaving me a lonely, empty vacuum once more. This place, this apartment, Jeez, it was once so different. I can remember talking, as articulately and laconically, like my Dead-brain only manages inside my own head. My tongue wasn't a dried up old sponge and my lips weren't thinned into a rictus grin. I could laugh and smile and even smirk, with nary a groan or a shrug in sight. I know these memories are stolen, ripped from Robin's friend's dying brain, but I savour them greedily, because they _feel_ like mine.

In these memories, all around me were people, living people, who knew me and who loved me. But the irony is that, as I half expected, those feelings, those warm emotions, quickly evaporate leaving me bereft.

"Robin…" My lips fumble with her name, like my body is rebelling against the receding memories; rejecting them, like a virus. I can hear movement in the bedroom.

"You killed everyone didn't you?" I hear her shout, then she does eerily quiet. After a few moments, the bedroom door creaks open. She's got a gun, a shotgun, and she's pointing it right at me. "Go for the brain, right? Yeah. Knew one day this baby would come in handy."

"Gun… nut…" I say, because the residue of a stolen memory tells me that she is one. I should have known there would be weapons in her bedroom. Her dead friend would have known. Damn the unreliability of his dying brain!

A kind of horror passes over her face. "Stop that! Stop it!" She shouts. "You're a _thing_! Stop talking and using my _name_ and… and pretending you… just stop it!" She's crying and the gun is shaking in her hands.

Robin Scherbatsky could always shoot straight, I think. Why is she trembling? Why hasn't she fired?

"Do you know those people you killed?" Robin says, her voice catching, slowed down by emotion as she tries to regain some control of herself. "No, of course you don't. You're an undead monster. But if you did… if you had one shred of human feeling, you'd know that you just killed your best friend. You just killed Ted Mosby. I saw you do it! And the reason you got him was because he took one look at you and he thought there might be something left in that meat shell. Ted saw his friend and it made him weak! Ted thought he knew who you were!"

I can see her getting angry again. I can see her determination growing stronger and the gun getting steadier.

"Who… am I?" I ask her, my voice loosening a little through use. There's more subtlety of tone, less rasp.

She just shakes her head and takes aim. "Only somebody I loved."

And because I'm a zombie, and because she's a woman with a gun, I lunge at her then, and the gun fires, but it misses my head and the buckshot eats through my shoulder and she collapses back under me. She manages to drag herself a couple of feet but I'm stronger and more inhuman than her, and I'm more dead than her, and I'm hungrier than her, and my teeth sink into her and snuff out the sparkle of her life.

_Sparkles…_

And then she's gone.

#~-

I have no idea who I am.

I hang out in a bar a lot. It's one of those basement bars that were fashionable in a city that used to be so teaming with life. But there's no life here now, only us. The Dead.

But I have this idea, this belief that I belong here, like I'm waiting for something to happen or for somebody to come for me. It's Christmas, and I feel like a kid waiting for Santa. Sometimes I reach into my jacket pocket and my fingers fumble at the crumpled paper inside. It's a photograph - a photograph of five, laughing people. I have no idea who these people are but for reasons I can't understand, when I look at the photo I feel the tiniest hint of peace.

So I keep the photo in my pocket like a talisman and I wait here, in this bar. Because good to stick with what you know. You know?


End file.
